Fondazione dell’Albero d’Oro
Palazzo Vendramin Grimani
San Polo, 2033
30125, Venice
T +39 041 8727 750
info@fondazionealberodoro.org
C.F. 94096710275
PEC fondazionealberodoro@legalmail.it
Conference
Two events exploring the symbolism of the mirror in artistic and spiritual traditions, between East and West, intertwining the history of images, mysticism, and storytelling. The lectures will be held in French, with simultaneous translation into Italian.
Free admission upon reservation.
Sunday May 23, 6 PM
Le miroir magique
Ever since fascinated humanity first perceived its reflection in a pool of water — the myth of Narcissus — and later polished mirrors of obsidian as in ancient Mexico, of burnished bronze in Pharaonic Egypt and then in Greco-Roman culture, and finally of glass until it shimmered with all its iridescent gleams in Renaissance and Baroque Venice, the mirror-city par excellence where even paintings presented themselves as reflections, humanity has gazed into the surface of an infinite, and therefore magical, depth: often attempting, through the centuries, to read within it the innermost secrets of the human soul, to decipher the entire universe, even to scrutinize both past and future — for a polished mirror never lies, as the cruel queen in the famous Brothers Grimm tale well knew. Speculation, reflection: our very language compares thought itself to a mirror.
This first lecture traces the history, symbolism, and aesthetics of the mirror across various arts and civilizations, from pre-Columbian Mexico through the pictorial illusionism of the Italian Renaissance envisioned by Leon Battista Alberti as early as 1435, to the modern rejection of the canvas-as-mirror by Picasso and Matisse.
From Buddhist mysticism to the Sufi speculation of medieval Islam, the theme of the mirror of the soul — a central object of sacred Chinese and Japanese meditation, but also painted upon polished walls gleaming like mirrors around the immense Rock of Sigiriya by the Buddhist monks of Sri Lanka in the 5th century CE (and a distant reflection of that same Rock of Sigiriya, made famous across Eurasia, would even appear upon Dante’s Mount Purgatory) — was taken up and amplified by the most profound Muslim philosophers.
They would indeed transmit this shimmering image from Avicenna (980–1037) and al-Ghazālī (1058–1111) in Persia, then onward to Andalusia with Ibn Ṭufayl (1110–1185) and Ibn ‘Arabī (1165–1240) — not forgetting Christian mystics such as Amalric of Bène (1150–1207), Marguerite Porete (1250–1310), Ramón Llull (1231–1316), and Meister Eckhart (1260–1328), who reflected so many similar ideas — before its dazzling illustration in the Persian poetry of Nizami (1141–1209), ‘Attār (died c. 1221), and above all Rūmī (1207–1273): further illuminated by the miniaturists, calligraphers, and ceramic artists from one end of the Muslim world to the other. For from the sultanates of Morocco and neighboring Spain to the Indo-Muslim kingdoms, the mirror of the soul would become, almost as a prefiguration of Einstein today, a resolution to the equation of the universe.
Illustration: Mirrored calligrams from the Ulu Cami (Ulu Djāmiʿ) Mosque in Bursa, Turkey (18th century): “He is God” — and its reflection be our visible universe; on the right: the sacred mirror in the Shintō shrine of Fushimi Inari-taisha in Kyoto, Japan, a sanctuary dating according to legend to the year 711, and in its present form to 1499.
Michael Barry
Michael Barry (born in New York in 1948) is a Franco-American historian and professor at Princeton University, specializing in medieval Islamic civilization, Persian culture and the history of Afghanistan. He has taught Islamic Culture in Princeton’s Department of Near Eastern Studies since 2004, served as consultative chairman of the Department of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2005–2009), and has been a special consultant to the Aga Khan Trust for Culture since 2009.
Author of major works on the art and history of Afghanistan, he won France’s Prix Femina in 2002 for his biography of Ahmad Shah Massoud. Before entering academia, he spent over twenty years in Afghanistan as a humanitarian worker and international consultant, also testifying before the U.S. Senate on Soviet war crimes.